Family

Family

Family counts. It's where you start. It shapes you, nurtures you, and quite possibly exasperates you more than any other group you know. You could easily spend most of your lifetime living in families and even when you live separately, you can find yourself organising your life around family commitments. The interesting thing is that families are so different. Your family might include one generation or five, one parent or many, lots of siblings or none, people connected through blood ties or people brought together by choices, circumstance or legal relationships. Whatever collection of people you might think of as your family right now, the make up of that group will change over time. The inevitable process of family members maturing requires your relationships to grow and develop as well. Family transitions require you to adapt. Sometimes those changes are part of a natural process. Sometimes they are a cause for celebration, and sometimes they feel like a loss. Simply acclimatising to the change stretches your capacity for flexibility. Families are complex systems. They are an important influence in your life. They can provide some of the most challenging situations you ever face. Family Values The word "family" can mean different things to different people. But no matter how our families are made up, most share some common values. It's worth thinking about what these are. We don't often talk about the values that hold our families together. Yet they are always there, shaping the way we behave towards one another. Our values are what we draw on to cope with the ups and downs of family life. Some values have been around forever while others may have been adopted quite recently by our parents' or grandparents' generations. It's worth thinking about our beliefs about birth, raising our children and the points where we pass from one stage of life to another. What values do we hold around adolescence, for instance, or death? Are there things our family believed in in the past that we would like to go back to? Or are there values previous generations held that no longer fit our lives? When we start thinking along these lines it's likely that most families will come up with a fairly common set of principles. For instance, most would say they support one another, trust one another, care for each other when things get tough, share their resources and make sure everyone in the family is safe. It's important to talk about what binds us together because this is how children learn about how to treat others. What they learn at home about respecting and caring for others, and taking responsibility, feeds into their relationships at school, on the sports field, at work and, eventually, into their own families as adults. Sometimes parents haven't had the opportunity to think about these sorts of things. Or they have been raised in families that were not safe, where they were abused, hurt or not respected. However, it's possible to break this cycle. We can choose to build families that are different from the ones we grew up in. For instance, there are lots of things we can do to make our families work well. We can learn how to communicate so that our messages and feelings are understood and we understand how other people are feeling and what they are trying to tell us. We can also learn how to resolve conflict in safe ways that strengthen our relationships and reinforce our values. Conflict is an inevitable, natural and healthy part of family life. No matter how close we are to someone we will find differences, and some of these will be irritating to us. But once we understand the other person's point of view our relationship with them will improve. LOVE YOUR FAMILY, 'cause without them ... you'll never exist.